Technical Field
The present invention relates to submarine networks, and more particularly to providing security in submarine networks.
Description of the Related Art
Submarine optical networks form the backbone of global communication networks, and generally include main trunks that connect trunk terminals (e.g., point-to-point cable links with in-line optical amplifiers to boost the signal power), and branch paths which connect to other branch terminals. A branching unit (BU) is a network element that splits the signal between the main trunk and the branch path and vice versa. This allows the signals from different paths to share the same fiber instead of installing dedicated fiber pairs for each link. BUs generally perform signal splitting and combining functions optically, and thus the BU has a similar function as an optical add/drop multiplexer (OADM) in terrestrial wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) networks.